Ghost, p.10
Ghost, page 10
They see the light go out under the door.
“Are you still there?” he calls out.
“Yes, I’m here,” says Jenny. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m just sitting outside the door.”
“Please don’t leave.”
“I’m not leaving,” Jenny says to the door. “Do you want anything?” Martin doesn’t answer. She begins whispering things to him through the door.
An hour later, Martin says that he would like a ham sandwich. When Jenny brings the sandwich, Martin opens the door a crack, a hand comes out of the darkness and takes the sandwich, the door closes again and locks. Jenny remains by the door, whispering to him in a steady stream.
In another hour, Martin comes out of the washroom. Without saying a word to the staff in the hallway, he goes to his office and closes the door.
ONE MORNING, DAVID IS CALLED to the reception area. Some people are waiting for you in the sitting parlor, says Martha. I don’t know who they are. I don’t know anything about it. Then why did you let them in? says David, annoyed. Martha shrugs her shoulders. They look like, you know, lawyers.
Theresa Gaignard and Lester Mewhinney. Both of the visitors appear to be in their mid-forties. Ms. Gaignard is wearing a smart, tapered jacket over a white blouse, stockings and black leather shoes, peach-colored lipstick, not a hair out of place, while Mr. Mewhinney has on a gray silk suit and silk tie, with a small gold pin in his lapel. When Mr. Mewhinney opens his mouth, David can see gold fillings in his teeth. Ms. Gaignard and Mr. Mewhinney are refined-looking and relaxed, much more relaxed than any lawyer David has met. They apologize for not calling in advance to make an appointment—they didn’t, in fact, expect to be able to speak to him on their first visit.
“Can we sit down?” says Ms. Gaignard, gesturing to the sofa. She glances at the coffee table and smiles. “I see that you appreciate William Blake. Something that we have in common. I like his drawings as much as his poems.” She turns to her colleague. “Do you know Blake, Lester?” Mr. Mewhinney shakes his head no, with a trace of irritation, as if he resents the suggestion that he might be less cultivated than his colleague.
Ms. Gaignard hands David one of her cards, which has an embossed logo of two overlapping circles. Ms. Gaignard and Mr. Mewhinney explain that they represent a nonprofit organization called the Society for the Second World. “It’s an international society,” Ms. Gaignard says, “a philosophical and scientific society devoted to a comprehensive view of existence.”
“What does that mean?” asks David. They certainly have the mumbo jumbo of lawyers as he remembers it from his one semester in law school.
“Bear with us, Mr. Kurzweil.” The society includes philosophers, doctors, lawyers, scientists, theologians, artists, and “more Ph.D.’s than a small university.” Ms. Gaignard does most of the talking. Her voice is pleasant and earnest at the same time, similar to the voice of one of the executives at the bank where David used to work. She has placed her small, elegant briefcase on the coffee table next to the volume of William Blake.
“We’ve read the recent articles about you,” says Ms. Gaignard. “I wouldn’t imagine that you were too happy with them.” She pauses and smiles. “I wouldn’t be. My word, everything was such a mishmash of secondhand information.”
“Newspapers have become irresponsible these days,” says Mr. Mewhinney. He leans forward on the sofa, placing his well-manicured hands on his knees. “Journalists have no interest in the truth anymore. They’re only interested in sensationalism and popular culture, movie stars and all that. I used to be in publishing, and I’ve watched it happen. It’s a disappointing decline.”
David nods. Mr. Mewhinney and Ms. Gaignard, whatever their business, are clearly not here to arrange a funeral. They shouldn’t have come during regular hours, but he’ll be polite and spend another few minutes with them. And he does like Ms. Gaignard. He decides that she is more attractive than Sally Jacoby, his colleague at the bank. In an indirect manner, she is flattering him, making him feel important, but he has his guard up. So many people have come to talk to him in the last month.
“Still,” says Ms. Gaignard. The word hangs in the air. “We take the subject seriously.”
“What subject is that?” David asks.
“The subject of the articles.” With a graceful sweep of her hand, she smooths her pleated skirt. “We respect you, Mr. Kurzweil. We’ve looked you up a bit—nothing confidential or invasive—and we know enough about you to have a high regard for you. That’s why we wanted to come talk to you.”
But David does feel invaded. They’ve looked him up. There’s no privacy anymore, he thinks to himself. Every letter a person has written, every word spoken is recorded somewhere. Everything is public. He’s hardly a prominent figure, and yet he’s been “looked up.”
“We want to earn your trust,” says Mr. Mewhinney. At that, he opens the briefcase and takes out some pages, the résumés of some of their members. There are names David has never heard of, but with impressive credentials. He will keep his guard up.
“We’d like to ask you something,” says Ms. Gaignard. “Actually, we’ve come quite a long distance to talk to you.” She pauses. “Did you see something unusual here?”
“Yes.” David is surprised at himself. How baffling it is that a person can utter a word before any conscious decision has been made to speak. Evidently, the brain and the mouth are not connected. His intention was to say nothing to these people, but he finds himself mesmerized by the sound of Ms. Gaignard’s voice.
“You saw something…with no rational explanation, here in this mortuary?”
“Yes.” Who are these people?
“That’s what we wanted to know, Mr. Kurzweil.” Ms. Gaignard and Mr. Mewhinney exchange glances, and Mr. Mewhinney takes out a small notebook from his breast pocket. “We weren’t sure from the newspaper accounts,” says Ms. Gaignard, “so we wanted to ask you in person. We look into these reports when we think there’s reason to look into them, when the people involved are thoughtful people, such as yourself. As you can imagine, there are a lot of kooks out there. But we were especially impressed by your…seriousness.”
“We’d like you to assist us,” says Mr. Mewhinney. “And maybe we can be of some service to you.” Mr. Mewhinney places the résumés back into the briefcase. “Let me say that you’re in good company, Mr. Kurzweil. We’ve all experienced events that, one way or another, don’t have…any rational explanation. And why should we expect everything to have a rational explanation? The world is complex. More than we can imagine. There are things beyond our human comprehension. We’re ants, Mr. Kurzweil. Does an ant understand what has happened when, one day, a man puts his boot down on the anthill? Think about that.”
The image of the ant and the anthill is so compelling that, for a few moments, David pictures himself as an ant, scrambling over the mound of an anthill. Suddenly, a giant boot descends from the sky…
Ms. Gaignard explains that they would like to help David cope with what she calls his “second-world experience.” Such experiences, she says, can be disorienting, similar to a person’s first flight in an airplane. Isn’t it strange, she says, how huge buildings can dwindle to toys in a dollhouse, how a hodgepodge of highways and fields can take on an orderly pattern. Clouds, once impossibly high, lie far below in a white fluffy carpet. Do you remember? she asks, smiling—not a condescending or fabricated smile, but a genuine smile. At an altitude, says Ms. Gaignard, you see things that you didn’t see before, things that were there all along but not visible on the ground. What we call the “second world” is like that, she says. The Society believes—in fact the Society knows from its own research and observations—that there exists a second world, parallel to the first world. Parallel but very different in nature. The second world is not a physical world, she says. It has its own laws. The second world may or may not be the work of a deity. We keep an open mind, says Ms. Gaignard. We’ve found that certain people, and sometimes certain special locations, have access to the second world. Of course, those people usually can’t immediately comprehend that experience. We want to help in that comprehension. We want to facilitate those communications and contacts. We want to learn. From time to time, we get brief glimpses of the second world, but we want to know so much more. “Tell us,” she says, “have you been disoriented since your experience?”
David stands up from his chair. He finds himself greatly disturbed. From time to time, we get brief glimpses… Hasn’t he had the identical thoughts? In his mind, against his will, he sees it again, the terrible seconds burning in his mind. Do Mr. Mewhinney and Ms. Gaignard know what he saw? He’s afraid to describe it, yet he wants to tell them. Now they are staring at him as if they can gaze into his mind, staring and smiling as they recline so easily on the sofa. Why do they sit so easily? He looks away, into the hall. He feels nauseated all over again. For the last month, he’s been spending afternoons in the slumber room, twisting the draperies this way and that in an attempt to create one of Robert’s “weird light effects,” but he hasn’t succeeded. It was not a special effect of the light. No lighting produced what he saw. Could he have imagined it? The thought constantly thrashes about in his mind. He must have imagined it. There is only one world. The world of tables and chairs, the earth spinning hard on its axis, blood throbbing in veins. And when the heart stops the animal dies. Many times now, he’s seen death on the embalming table, final death. Cells without oxygen cease their convulsions. Tissues dry up and rot. Atoms scatter. Cause and effect. The Pythagorean theorem. And yet…Ms. Gaignard and Mr. Mewhinney are persuasive. She strikes him as genuine. Mr. Mewhinney he doesn’t much care for—he’s a little too smooth and he seems to be on somebody’s payroll. But she is genuine and attractive, and he wants to believe her. She has a family, she tells him, a husband, a daughter, a son. She eats dinner with her family when she’s not traveling, she says, at six o’clock every night. She cooks and her husband does the cleaning. She has advanced degrees. He wants to believe her. Other people have reported experiences like his, she says. Could they all be imagined? What are the probabilities? Yes, that’s it. He should think of it all in terms of the probabilities. Solid material. “Are you all right, Mr. Kurzweil?” Is he losing his mind? What is the probability that he imagined that thing on April 23? What is the probability for ten people at ten different mortuaries? Somewhere a telephone rings. Martha’s voice. He should take the vacation that Martin has offered—not to be treated, but to rest. He would like a rest; that’s what he needs, a rest to settle his mind. What are the probabilities? “Mr. Kurzweil?” And after his rest, he’ll visit his mother. She’s aging rapidly these days, she’s a diminishing stump of a candle, and he shouldn’t stay away any longer. He can picture her holding her glass of water in her veined hands. “We hope we didn’t upset you, Mr. Kurzweil.” What? What did they say? What are the probabilities? It must be a question of the probabilities. Now they’re standing, Ms. Gaignard and Mr. Mewhinney. Can they see into his mind? “We’ll be in touch. With your permission, we’d like to conduct some experiments.” What?
Ophelia cannot contain herself. For the last hour, she’s been pleading with Dr. Tettlebeim to let her watch the experiments in the slumber room. “I’ll sit in the back and won’t say a word,” she whimpers. “Or I can help.”
Dr. Tettlebeim, a small, gentle man dressed in a suit and bow tie, waves Ophelia away with apologies and repeats that the Society prefers not to have spectators. “Interferes with the intentionality,” he says. His pimpled assistant nods in agreement and continues his work positioning the mirrors and candles. The sound-absorbing panels Dr. Tettlebeim installs himself. “Mr. Kurzweil, are you prepared?”
As he’s been instructed, David practices closing first one eye and then the other in front of the mirror. He’s also been told to wear loose clothing, to take off his wristwatch, and to think only quiet thoughts. A light meal of fruit and vegetables beforehand was highly advised. With reluctance, David has agreed to participate in the investigations, after Ms. Gaignard talked to him in the lobby of his apartment building for over an hour. After which Jenny argued with Martin for two days to allow “those people” into their funeral home.
Ophelia knocks again. “Dr. Tettlebeim, I have some tea for you.” She comes into the slumber room, her eyes growing big as she regards the mirrors and candles and acoustic panels. “All my life, I’ve wanted to see something like this,” she says.
“All right,” says Dr. Tettlebeim with a sigh. “All right. How can I say no to such a determined young lady. But please, dear, sit in the back and try not to make any sound.” Ophelia is ecstatic. She winks at David and crosses her fingers in a good-luck sign.
From a CD player, Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” quietly begins ebbing and flowing through the room. “I hope that you like Beethoven,” Dr. Tettlebeim says softly. “I find that the first two movements are excellent for promoting a restful atmosphere.”
As the opening adagio moves through his body, David tries to think calm thoughts. The steady bass triplets sound to him like an old man with a cane walking down a long road to unfasten a gate. The old man is so enduring and steadfast. As he walks in triple beats—left foot, right foot, cane/left foot, right foot, cane—the gate continues to retreat in the distance. But the old man will not give up. On and on he walks toward the gate—left foot, right foot, cane/left foot, right foot, cane. Why does he want to unfasten the gate? David wonders. What’s on the other side? But he will not give up. In steady and patient triplets, he keeps walking. And then the melody to accompany the bass triplets, so sad, a lamentation. The melody knows why the old man wants to unfasten the gate, knows what is on the other side, and the knowing is sad.
“Lights,” whispers Dr. Tettlebeim. His assistant walks around the cavernous room, turning off each porcelain lamp one by one. Then the heavy velvet drapes. It is dusk, the optimum time according to the doctor, and the room is illuminated only by a single candle behind David.
David leans back in the chair, listening to the old man walk down the road, and stares into the mirror. He sees the candle flickering, he sees the dim moon of Ophelia’s face in the back of the room, he sees Dr. Tettlebeim sitting quietly in a chair. In this light, the doctor’s hair is silver, the wrinkles in his face silver shadows, his blue eyes shining dark dots. This will take some time, Dr. Tettlebeim says softly. These are sensitive matters. We are told, he whispers, that Nostradamus used a mirror and candle to gaze into the future. Our Society cannot accept such unverified reports, but they are suggestive. What is the future, Mr. Kurzweil? The second world does not obey the same laws for time as the first. The separation between past and future, in fact the very concepts of past and future, may simply be a human construction, a figment of how our limited brains grasp the world. But I am intruding on your experience.
Dr. Tettlebeim’s ideas do not seem so unreasonable to David. He has often wondered about the split between future and past. Why, in a sliver of a second, does something that was once in the future become something now in the past? And why does it not also go in the opposite direction? What causes that razor-sharp line between future and past? It seems to David that nothing in nature is so sharp. If he looked at that line with a high-powered microscope, he imagines, he might well find that it is not really so sharp. It might have fuzzy filaments, crooks, and valleys that allow events to slip across in either direction, or perhaps to get snagged in the boundary, neither future nor past. And if there isn’t a sharp boundary between future and past, then maybe what we think of as the future is already determined. If so, then the act of making a decision to do one thing or another is only an illusion. Perhaps our decisions are already made. In which case our lives are like railroad tracks already laid. Was it like that when Ellen called from the hotel? Did he have to say yes? But he wanted to say yes. Why did he want to say yes? Was he simply following the track? And if there isn’t a sharp boundary between future and past, then maybe what we think of as the past never actually happened, or maybe it hasn’t yet happened. In which case, he never went to room 317 with Ellen. But he feels. He feels the chair against his bottom. He feels his shoes against his toes. Are his feelings future or past? What is a feeling? Does it take place in his brain? Is a feeling a feeling before it is consciously recognized as a feeling? His head aches….
The second movement, the allegretto.
You needn’t strain, Mr. Kurzweil. If there are spirits in tangential contact with our sphere, they will make themselves optically known in due course. And please, do not be alarmed by anything you see. Are you beginning to relax? Yes, says David. He must stop thinking of future and past, of decisions and feelings. The music streams through his body. Dr. Tettlebeim’s voice itself has become part of the music, steady and smooth and touched with a sadness. Does Dr. Tettlebeim know why the old man wants to unfasten the gate? As you relax, says the doctor, your arms will begin to feel heavy. Just let your arms lie at your side. Let your arms be heavy if they want to be heavy. Describe to me what you see in the mirror. It looks like a deep lake, David says. Good. The mirror may turn cloudy. That is what some people report just before contact. Or the mirror may darken. If you see an image of something or someone, just let the image trickle by you like water. Don’t try to control the images. You may see someone you know, someone who has departed this physical world, a deceased father, a deceased mother, a grandparent, or possibly a stranger. You may see only a peculiar sign, or a pattern of some kind. These too can have great significance. Is the mirror clouding or becoming darker? David stares at the mirror. It does seem slightly darker to him. Yes. But no new images have appeared. Behind him, the doctor is whispering something to his assistant. David continues to gaze into the mirror. For a long time, he gazes into the mirror. What would he wish to see? he wonders. Certainly not the thing that he saw on April 23. He might like to see his father. And if his father appeared to him now, what would he look like? How old would he be? Would he be the age that he was when he died, in his late thirties, or the age he would be now, seventy or so? Is it his father who walks down the long road to unfasten the gate?
